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We had a "weekend rental" in our neighborhood - it was not listed through AirBnB. What did it mean?

Well, the street became a hotel parking lot. The house became a place to throw a party for forty out-of-town guests, and the neighborhood residents...well at $500 a night why should a renter give a fuck about them?

The couple hooking up on the down-low, well they sent the brats outside during morning nookie time. The kids entertained themselves by throwing rocks at the neighbor's car in her driveway. The three families staying for a youth baseball tournament - their kids swung from Jimmy's backboard until the rim popped out. The six guys attending their reunion sat on the hoods of their cars till the wee hours drinking beer and tossing the empties.

The business model shifts the costs of hotel use unto surrounding properties. Next week, however, our absentee landlord gets their day in court to explain their violations of the zoning regulations. Hopefully the threat of jailtime will make an impression.

I would be interested to hear how that goes. Do you know if they listed on VRBO or some similar service? Is the service involved in the case yet?

These are the kinds of things the supervisors in Sunnyvale wonder about in terms of "What happens when ..." and it sounds like some case law might be available (ideally in California but you don't mention where this is)

Yes, one of their listings was on VRBO.

The way things went down was that the owner bought the house at the low point in the housing market and had it as a traditional rental - as a college town we have a fairly stable rental market. Last summer, (according to the neighbors nearby), the stable renter was booted and the house started being rented for game days and other weekends. Around New Years, we had dinner with some of the people more impacted - I live diagonally across an intervening block.

My neighbors were bothered by it, but didn't know enough about zoning regulations to know that the use was flat out illegal. The closest neighbor felt constrained by norms of neighborliness despite the fact that the owner did not live there and was running a hotel. However, zoning regulations are something I have dealt with regularly for many years.

A couple of months ago, I had a bit of a close call while walking the dog as one of the transients returned from Taco-Bell in their Expedition. It was then that I realized that the renters were as complicit in the activity as the Owner...so I spoke to the renters as they parked and advised them that their activity was a violation of zoning and unwanted by the neighbors. Hmmm...that's probably better than trying to change the Owner's ethics, and I can be as much of an asshole as the next man when I wish.

The next Saturday morning I was walking my dog as that week's renters arrived. I spoke with them about the same subject. Turns out one of the renters was a swinging dick lawyer from upstate. He figured to run me down the road by threatening to call the police.

And that's when it hit me, what could be better evidence of the activity than a police report with the renter explaining their agreement with the Owner? I told him calling the police was a capitol idea, and advised him of the address when he could not tell the dispatcher where he was. Sure, it cost me forty-five minutes with our City's finest, but it didn't leave the City Manager any more excuses for ignoring the problem.

So Zoning eventually got around to sending the Owner a letter, despite which we continued to get transients - the economic considerations didn't change and Zoning enforcement trying to be nice was taken as a sign of weakness.

It took a bit more followup (complaints), and the genteel neighbor realizing that the Owner didn't intend to reciprocate the neighborly behavior.

So the hearing is in municipal court next week and several of we neighbors are available to testify about the activity.

You're a better man than me... I would have probably "arranged" for something to happen to the house when it was unoccupied. Or perhaps that's just wishful thinking ;)

Hell, three different neighbors considered addressing some of the situations with guns - it's Alabama. I always saw it as economics, and an insurance claim would probably have been a boon.

Mischief would only reinforce the property owner's conviction that it was ok to externalize the costs upon the neighborhood - though that doesn't mean I didn't think devious thoughts. It just turned out that once I stopped pretending that the renters were ignorant of the illegality, events began to resolve of their own accord.

Besides, I have no interest in spending time in jail. That is a world of suck.

>Hell, three different neighbors considered addressing some of the situations with guns - it's Alabama.

Is this a serious comment? I guess it's one of the reasons I'm grateful not to live in the United States. The fact people in your area might turn to using deadly force to address noise complaints and misbehaved kids completely blows my mind.

Twenty minutes from where I live in any direction, someone probably hunts the land. Guns are as common as hammers.

Was my comment serious? yes. Were people seriously considering shooting someone? Of course not - they were expressing their frustration with the overall situation. Had they been inclined to shoot someone when annoyed, they would have done it long before the now.

However, the truth of it is, there is no reason to believe that a transient lodger isn't going to roll into the neighborhood at 2am armed and drunk and starting trouble. That's the volatility in the mix, and why the AirBnB model poses problems in residential districts not structured to accommodate them. And that's the worry that my neighbors, and I, have.

I probably would have just jimmied a door open and introduced some feral cats or something. Maybe a family of racoons, that's all. Guns or violence is way over the top, though I guess I could understand how your neighbors would be pissed.

Side note: This is among the reasons free parking is terrible.

Excellent point. For a larger discussion of this, see Shroup's The High Cost of Free Parking: http://www.amazon.com/High-Cost-Parking-Updated-Edition/dp/1...

Like most people in the US, I live in a neighborhood of detached single family dwellings on their own lot. Paid parking is even less viable than frequent efficient public transport. The actual development density is about 15 persons/acre or about 37 persons/hectare net for the neighborhood. Considering the surrounding development it's less than half that.

Strawman. Free parking is perfectly fine in low density non-commercial neighborhoods. The problem is how AirBnB enables commercial use of residential property.

Did you not report the various illegal activities being perpetrated to the police so that they could address them?

As a land use issue, the police don't get involved. By local ordinance police power resides in the zoning department not our police department. However, because zoning violations are punishable by jail time under our ordinance they are criminal offenses.

I think he was referring to the beer drinking/rock throwing/etc...

A few calls to the cops to report unruly behavior, and a letter or two to the homeowner may have been enough to get the homeowner to be more vigilant in controlling the tenants, or would encourage a return to longer term tenants.

The nearby neighbors made the mistake of thinking that the property owner was a fellow homeowner. The problem is that the property owner doesn't see things that way. In their eyes, its a business and the neighbors who tried to deal with the problems person to person was just showing their lack of sophistication - this was a "pay yourself first" endeavor.

Jimmy's father built the goal at the end of the driveway when Jimmy was about 8. It is a thing of beauty - Ryan was a craftsman. Three summers ago he drove Jimmy and his teammates to the AAU Nationals. The next Thanksgiving he was diagnosed with liver cancer. 15 months later he died. When, I heard how the damage had been done and that the property owner had promised to get it fixed, but hadn't, that's when it was clear the owner didn't give fuck about the neighborhood or the people affected by their business.

It's simple economics. Two weekends a month gets the owner past breakeven, and the third and fourth are mostly profit. The values systems between the property owner and the neighborhood residents are incommensurate.

In the end, all it took was for two assholes to collide and agree that calling the police was the best solution. Well that and hitting the city manager and elected officials over the head with email.

2 other common reasons to organize against airbnb are 1) neighborhoods don't like transient guests when their expectation was that the neighborhood were permanent residents and 2) airbnb is avoiding state taxes

http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/03/28/airbnbs-tax-and-tena...

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/newtechcity/blogs/new-tech-city-bl...

I don't use or support services like AirBnB for this reason. If any of these "disruptive" services actually cared about their customers, they would gladly comply with government regulations that are meant to protect us.

AirBnB is great if you're white, able-bodied, and have no expectation of quality (or even an expectation of a safe, habitable environment), but just Google around for issues of racial discrimination with hosts and AirBnB's complete lack of support for disabled people.

These are all issues that have been through the legal system for close to 100 years, yet now we celebrate when we throw out our progressive ideals for something as petty as cash savings?

To be fair - most of the points you've brought up apply to a pretty good majority of the random bed and breakfasts I've stayed at.

What does white have to do with this?

Reference to the historical stance of a successful, rich, and otherwise not-descriminated-against US citizen.

"Check your privilege CIS scum"

Hotel organizations that aren't able to adapt to changing market conditions should fail. So should banks. Hopefully, we learned our lesson from "too big to fail" - we shouldn't artificially indemnify organizations against the impact of change, or we'll wind up having to choose between living with a stagnant, immovable status quo, or dealing with a catastrophic collapse.

The "tech suites" idea is great. Maybe you could even turn some of them into something like a "startup dorm", which would fit nicely into an incubator/VC setting.

I'm afraid not really. With all the regulations being placed on banks, it's only inevitable that banks will get bigger and bigger since there's less money to be made so some will try to go for scale and volume.

on the other it means there will be a huge gap between really cheap motels and really high end hotels.

As a middle-market customer, I really hate it when this happens. Most notably, airlines. The air travel market for the flights I make is pretty strongly segregated between $400 fares and $4000 fares, and you get what you pay for.

I live close to a stadium and My neighborhood is routinely trashed by airbnb cheapo college kid boarders who come here to party.